As parkour has grown in popularity, a lot of companies have created and sold parkour shoes. A lot of people ask me what is the best shoe for parkour, so I’ve put together this guide to the most common shoes people might suggest for parkour. This is by no means an exhaustive list, these are just the most common ones that I have enough experience with to review.

One quick note: I am a big fan of minimalist shoes. There’s a lot of research out there that shows that the more padding and cushioning a shoe has, the MORE damage it does to your feet, knees, and hips. That’s out of the scope of this article though.

Full disclosure: In early 2010 I received some free Ariakes from K-Swiss. This has not influenced my review, but I wanted to be transparent.

Description: This was the first shoe created and marketed specifically for Parkour. They’re made by K-Swiss. They sent a lot of free pairs out to traceurs a few years ago to help spread the word about being a Parkour shoe. Many people wearing Ariakes got theirs for free, either directly from K-Swiss or from someone who got them from K-Swiss. They also come in lots of different (and crazy) colors, which can be a pro or a con depending on your preference. :)

Last night was my last night in Ramallah, and I spent the evening with a group of 6 or 7 people. We had hot dogs (SO MUCH BETTER than American hot dogs, by the way), played Mafia, and tried to play Never Have I Ever until the group fell apart into a bunch of side discussions.

It was late and I still haven’t completely adjusted to the time change, so I was starting to drift off a little bit. But then I heard something that woke me right up. Someone (changing his name to Ahmed) said:

I asked him to tell me more. He went on to say that he was worried that these startups were too focused on individualism, and not focused enough on the good of the community.

I can't believe I'm here writing this. All my life I never thought it would happen to me, you know? I always thought I could fight it, I wouldn't be the guy who gives in. I've been making fun of the people who do as long as I can remember. The snide remarks, the slightly-less-than-playful jokes. I thought I was stronger than they were, better, cooler. But no - last Friday I gave in... I broke.

My name is Zachary Cohn... and I just switched to Mac.

I've been thinking about it for a while. The sleek unibody aluminum design, the efficiency resulting from it all being designed to work together, a unix base under the hood with a user friendly blanket on top. It was pretty tempting.

I've been using Windows for all my life. Started with 3.1, then 95, then 98. After a brief stint with ME, I got my first XP box. It was awesome! I knew how it worked, inside and out, I had grown up with it, and life was good. I built a desktop and got a laptop. My desktop slowly became a Frankenbox, my laptop got stolen and replaced with my current one. I graduated college, moved to Seattle, and now only have my laptop. It's definitely mine, covered in bumper stickers ranging from Streetlight Manifesto to TechTV, American Parkour to Unicycle.com.

The news dropped yesterday that Equifax, one of the three credit bureaus, got hacked and leaked 143 million customers information, including the Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, birth dates, addresses, and more. This is devastatingly bad. I wrote up this for some friends a few years ago, but never published it. Today, I decided to publish it.

So without any further adieu, here are 6 personal internet security steps you absolutely need to take.

If you don’t want to read anything, you just want to know what to install and what to do, here’s your list. If you want more information on any of these, read on…

My name is Zachary Cohn, and I've met a lot of people from the Internet. Most recently I met my doppelganger, Zachary Cohen.

[caption id="attachment_133" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="The Internet is a Series of Tubes"][/caption]Meeting people from the Internet is not a big deal to me anymore, although other people still freak out when I mention it. There have been three primary circles I've met people from: Massassi, Parkour, and The Rest of the Internet. The first two really helped me be comfortable with the last one.

Massassi.net started in 1997 and was dedicated to editing and modding a Star Wars game called Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. The game is now 14 years old, and except for the occasional game for “old times sake” no one has played in five years. But everyone was such good friends and the community was so tight that most people have stayed around. I found Massassi in 2001, and have checked it daily since.

The first person I met from the Internet was through Massassi, and was probably Gebhoq. I found out he lived about 20 minutes away, so we saw a play and grabbed lunch together. After that, I visited Rochester Institute of Technology, where I was going to go to school. There were six people from Massassi that, by chance, all ended up there, so we met up and they showed me around. I've met a bunch more people from Massassi, but I had talked daily with most of them for years, so it was more like reuniting with a long-time friend.

The next circle of internet meetings is through Parkour. When I first started training, there was no one experienced in my area. I saw on some local parkour forums that a bunch of people meeting up to train in Washington DC, so I drove down to meet them. I showed up in this park to find a dozen teenage boys, mostly shirtless, jumping, climbing, and flipping around. I was a bit nervous at first - I didn't even know most of their handles, let alone names or anything about them. Five minutes after introducing myself, I felt we'd known each other for years. Since that first parkour jam, I've been great friends with Leonn, Psychosis, Doc_Ahk, Kipup, and RPG.[caption id="attachment_135" align="alignright" width="150" caption="David Belle - Parkour"][/caption]

So in Part 1 of this series, I was talking about how I felt after I ordered my new Macbook Pro, but hadn't received it yet. It arrived Saturday night, but I didn't get a chance to open the box until Sunday.

If there's one thing Apple focuses on (this shouldn't be a surprise), it's the experience. Even just opening the box was impressive.

Once I got it out of the box, I scanned through the manual, then opened it up. Within 2 minutes, everything was configured and I was staring at that the desktop.

Aaaand then I didn't really know what to do from there. I decided to start moving through the System Preferences. I figured the best way to get familiar with a new OS was to see what I could change!

A few days ago, I was working with Nick Hughes planning out the next Seattle Startup Crawl. One common bit of feedback about the last event was that the four locations were way too spread out (Queen Anne to Pioneer Square to Downtown to Cap Hill...), so we wanted to find four startups who wanted to participate, but were all pretty close to each other.

Seattle2.0 has an awesome list of Seattle based startups, but there's no addresses or location data associated with them.

So last night I wrote a quick google apps script to scrape the Seattle20 Startup Index, run all the companies through Switchboard.com, and then export them to a Google map.

One of the biggest problems newbies in Starcraft have is when they are “floating money.” This is also referred to as having “Facebook money.” You only get to 3000 minerals and 2500 gas if you're not spending it, and when you're not investing your money in SOMETHING (production buildings, units, supply, upgrades, whatever!), it means you're falling behind. Having 3000 minerals doesn't win you matches, but if you turn that into 60 marines...

Real life is like this too! Piling up money in the bank is money you're not investing! Having some cash is good, but by converting that money into tangible assets you can make it useful.

In any macro Starcraft game (and Real Life is all about Macro), you need to expand your base in order to increase your income and survive. But if you expand at the wrong time, it's easy to get crushed. The timing of your expansion is based on a combination of how far into the game you are, your position relative to your opponents, and a few other factors.

Real life is just like this! If you don't expand into new projects and into new income streams, you risk getting contained and slowing your growth. But if you expand when you have too much going on, you won't be able to keep up and you will end up in a weaker position than when you started.

TL;DR: I’m publishing a read-only version of my live To Do and To-Done list.

Transparency has been a big theme lately. The current #talkpay movement encouraging people to publicly disclose their salaries. Pushes for wearable body cameras to bring greater transparency to policing. Transparency into NSA’s surveillance efforts.

Transparency isn’t just a buzzword - it’s a powerful thing. When something hides in the shadows, it’s hard to see exactly how big or small it is. What color it is. Sometimes even what it is altogether. So your imagination fills in the gaps. And we all know that the details our imaginations invent are rarely accurate.

But when you illuminate something hiding in the shadows, you can suddenly see all the details. The monster is revealed to be just an everyday coat hanger.

One of my parkour friends posted a video today of him doing a big jump over the water at the Seattle Waterfront. Someone commented on the video, asking "why he would do this," "what he was thinking," "what is the payoff in taking risks like that?" and that this was "stupid for someone with so much going for them."

These are things any traceur (someone who trains parkour) has heard before, and typically knows how to respond to. But there was something else in this woman's rant that echoed something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

She was talking about risk, but she doesn't quite understand what "risk" really is.